This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Thursday, October 24, 2013

A Strong Song Tows Us by Richard Burton (part two)

In “A Strong Song Tows
Us” Richard Burton attempts to account for Basil Bunting’s
‘disappearance’.“Mention Bunting
to a literate, educated young person these days and you will be met by polite
incomprehension. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s and 1970s he was arguably
the world’s most celebrated living poet.”(p7)

Burton investigates
the disappearance. He lists as reasons: regionalism (Bunting is ‘a northern
poet’) religion (Bunting is a ‘Quaker Poet’) voice (I don’t understand this
one), his association with Pound, difficulty, difficulty of getting short bits
of long poems in anthologies, but finally plumps for “auto-regionalisation” as
the main cause. (p17)

I think he’s wrong.
This is not a criticism of his book. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the way
poetry works in the modern world.Quality of poem as poem is not the issue. The shrinking of poetry from
the public domain into academic institutions means that what gets read at
school and taught at university, sets up a perverse kind of brand loyalty and
what is read at school has more to do with what schools have to do,than with any kind of poetics. If no one
ever published another poem, schools could continue blithely teaching their
compulsory version of poetry because it have never borne much relationship to how poems operate outside.

Burton demonstrates this when,
discussing ‘war poetry’.He
writes:

“We now think of the
poetry of the first world war as overwhelmingly critical of political and
military leaders’ strategy and tactics, articulating a sense of the
hopelessness of valour in the teeth of insuperable horror, but that is largely
because the poetry that has survived (because it is the best) was written by
poets-Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg,Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves- who subscribed to the view that it
was the futility and horror that needed to be in aperverse sense celebrated. If fact of the 2,225 poets who
published during the years of the war hardly any expressed the views that have
for generations of students defined it’s poetry.” (61)

It’s the bit in
brackets that betrays him:('because it is the best'.)

Is it? On what grounds?

In terms of getting a
reaction from students, if your class doesn’t respond to ‘Dulce et Decorum est’
you might want to join hands and contact the living: does that make it a great
poem? Schools use Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath not because they are great poets,
but because their poems get a
reaction and can be discussion starters for ‘Meaningful issues”.After all, isn’t great literature
supposed to be about important stuff?

The problem is that
discussing poetry, as poetry, requires both knowledge and a high level of
verbal sophistication. Burton has this, as he demonstrates reading Bunting. He
is able to explain why Villon is worthy of our attention, not because of its
content, but because of its rich verbal texture.

But how many people in
a class room can do that? How many
have ever heard of Yeats’ objections to Owen’s poetry and could navigate that
criticism? or Geoffrey Hill's "the poetry had better not be in the pity". How many have actually
asked themselves if their choice of poets is about the quality of the poetry,
or because in one way or another, they still are “Sandwich board men [and women] of the
revolution", in the case of “War Poets” representing values we’d like to think
we’d have in that situation.

Poems get chosen partly because of the syllabus
requirement, but partly because of the values they espouse. Are those four poets
Burton names really ‘the best’?Are
there really no good pro war poems written by one of the 2,221 other poets?

Bunting is not
appearing any time soon on a school curriculum. Imagine the essays they’d make
you write, at seventeen. Briggflatts is a great poem: discuss. Imagine
trying to explain what “the greatest British Modernist’ might mean in terms of
taking a class through I am agog for foam,
or Briggflatts, or Villon. I don’t think there are many
people who could do that. And I don't think many people would see the exercise as worthwhile. Once you've proven how good it is, what do you do next? Analyse the discourse of nationhood or masculinity it it?

For a poet to live in
the academy he or she has to be useable.And Bunting for all his brilliance, is resolutely not useable. It's one of the reasons he's brilliant.